Maybe the weirdest factor about Every thing All over the place All At As soon as, a movie through which a notable plot level includes riffing on 2001: A Area Odyssey to clarify an alternate actuality the place people developed scorching canine for fingers, is that it generally doesn’t really feel that bizarre. Directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, it lies on the intersection of a frenetic music video marathon, a slapstick martial arts comedy, and a surrealist sci-fi pastiche. However it’s anchored in an earnest household drama that’s elevated by a collection of nice performances, notably from central star Michelle Yeoh.

There’s an entire lot happening in Every thing All over the place, however the primary gist is easy. Evelyn Wang (Yeoh) is the harried proprietor of a failing laundromat and a messy, unsatisfying life. Her apparently milquetoast husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) has served her with divorce papers, her perpetually demanding father’s (James Hong) well being is failing, and her daughter Pleasure (Stephanie Hsu) is pissed off by Evelyn’s personal snippy disapproval. A ruthless IRS employee named Deirdre Beaubeirdra (Jamie Lee Curtis) is auditing her for, amongst numerous different doubtful selections, claiming a karaoke machine as a tax expense.

Then, as Evelyn is making a last-ditch try to avoid wasting her enterprise, Waymond’s physique is all of a sudden possessed by a counterpart from one in all near-infinite alternate realities. He tells her she’s the one one that can save the multiverse from a reality-destroying menace. And she or he nonetheless has to get her taxes executed.

As alt-Waymond acknowledges, the multiverse’s exact mechanics are complicated and never all the time logical. “Verse-jumpers” can use earpieces to puppet the our bodies of their alternate selves, and so they can osmose expertise from counterparts in different worlds by performing pivotal actions that set their lives on completely different paths. (For unexplained causes, most of those duties are painful or gross, like getting paper cuts or consuming chapstick.) The method opens a slight psychic hyperlink between the counterparts, and for verse-jumpers who push themselves too far, comprehending this vary of infinite potentialities can result in a devastating existential disaster.

The setup presents Kwan and Scheinert an opportunity to pinball between a number of mini-narratives and a very dizzying variety of colourful costume adjustments, and it justifies a collection of eccentric martial arts sequences that basically work on dream logic. Every thing All over the place’s combat scenes are extra entertaining, extra inventive, and better-shot than these of many full-fledged motion motion pictures, together with ones from the very cinematic franchises it’s clearly drawing on. (They’re much more enjoyable than nearly something within the Marvel movies made by the Russo brothers, who served as producers right here.)

Yeoh’s fundamental self is a pitch-perfect confused everywoman who can all of a sudden pull off unbelievable acrobatic feats tempered by goofy bodily comedy, whereas her different personas showcase her easy charisma. Quan shifts fluidly between his hapless primary-universe self and his hyper-competent alter-ego, with each tone and physique language flipping in split-second transitions. Even Curtis, launched as a snide bureaucrat, will get a menacing flip in one in all her many personas.

Every thing All over the place is stuffed with intricate connections and Chekhov’s weapons that cohere extra on an aesthetic degree than a story one. It’s continually looping again to construct prolonged multiverse vignettes from minor particulars earlier within the movie, together with jokes that vary from delicate to pretty crass. (This can be a good time to say that Kwan and Scheinert additionally directed Swiss Military Man, a movie that starred Daniel Radcliffe as a flatulent corpse.) A number of of those callbacks really feel extraneous, and based mostly on a Q&A session following the movie’s SXSW premiere, that’s after at the least one subplot was left on the chopping room ground. However they assist promote the movie’s humor by spinning cinematic references and throwaway gags — what when you put, like, every thing on a bagel, man — into deadpan scenes delivered with visible aptitude.

The dramatic parts nonetheless don’t all the time add up. Every thing All over the place’s sci-fi sequences will be written like they’re marking time between absurdities, peppered with expository dialogue that doesn’t gel with the extra compelling and naturalistic exchanges elsewhere. The script is stuffed with monologues about life and humanity that sound good in isolation however are shuffled round as abruptly because the movie’s costumes, asserting character motivations that haven’t been well-established earlier than that second.

Even so, the connection between Evelyn, Pleasure, Waymond, and (unexpectedly) Deirdre builds as much as one thing candy that stays simply a hair away from being cloying. Every thing All over the place’s particular person personas are largely archetypes, albeit archetypes that aren’t usually seen in mainstream sci-fi motion pictures. However the movie treats them as complementary sides of a single difficult particular person slightly than a plethora of separate entities. There’s no low cost ambiguity about whether or not any of the movie’s occasions are occurring — the multiverse positively exists, and it comprises individuals whose fingers are positively scorching canine — however its array of worlds have the vibe of fantasies that spotlight facets of the characters’ core selves, making them greater than gimmicks or weirdness for its personal sake.

This may be due much less to the script than to the forged, who carry consistency to essentially the most nonsensical eventualities. Quan provides Waymond a resilient vulnerability that comes by means of even when he’s dragging Evelyn across the multiverse. Whereas Hsu will get much less display time as her original-universe character, she balances being viciously nihilistic and hopelessly misplaced as one in all Pleasure’s alter egos. Deirdre is legitimately imply, however — like many real-world jerks — able to kindness and affection.

And in a movie evoking numerous earlier motion pictures about disaffected losers who uncover they’re secretly heroes, Yeoh presents a poignant and magnetic tackle the trope. Her protagonist is upset in life however nonetheless a functioning, mature human being surrounded by people who find themselves flawed however in the end first rate. Evelyn’s plunge into the multiverse is foreshadowed by the best way she navigates her multigenerational and multilingual household, her rapid-fire dialog switching between Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. One in every of Every thing All over the place’s operating jokes is that its protagonist is actually the least gifted potential model of herself, however the gaps between Evelyn’s selves by no means appear jarring — you’ll be able to imagine that just a few selections separate a beleaguered laundromat proprietor from a grasp chef or opera singer.

For all of the weird stuff that’s thrown into Every thing All over the place, Kwan and Scheinert’s riskiest transfer is arguably choosing a virtually 140-minute runtime for a comedy constructed round deliberate tonal whiplash, a doubtlessly polarizing fashion of humor, and an exhausting tempo. Every thing All over the place is a big tangled yarn ball of a film, and if it doesn’t give you the results you want, that feeling will final for a really, very very long time. If it does work, although, it may be one of the crucial charmingly ridiculous motion pictures you see this 12 months.

Every thing All over the place All At As soon as debuts in theaters on March twenty fifth